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August 05, 2014

Boot Camper laying down migration steps

More than a decade after HP began its migration away from MPE and HP 3000, there's another underway among the vendor's enterprise systems. OpenVMS customers are starting to look into what's needed to make a transition off the Digital servers. HP's announced that it will curtail the use of the newest VMS to the very latest generation of hardware. Thousands of servers are going to be stuck on an older OpenVMS.

That will be one element to spark the offers at next month's VMS Boot Camp in Bedford, Mass. We heard from a veteran HP 3000 and MPE developer, Denys Beauchemin, that his company is headed to the Boot Camp for the first time this year. There's engagements and consulting to be made in moving HP enterprise users to less HP-specific environments.

"We migrate them from VMS to Linux or other platforms," said Beauchemin, who was the last working chairman at the Interex user group before the organization went dark in 2005. "Another HP operating system comes to an end."

Boot Camp is a VMS tradition among HP's most-loyal general purpose computing community. (You can't call the 3000 community HP's any longer, now that the vendor is coming up on seven years without a working lab.) Boot Camps in the past were annual meetings to advance the science and solutions around VMS. But in more recent times they haven't been annual. Now there's migration advice on hand for the attendees. Some may view it with disdain, but when a vendor sends up signals of the end of its interest, some kinds of companies make plans right away to migrate.

There is a strong presence in the VMS community for the Stromasys virtualized server solutions. Stromasys made its bones helping VAX and Alpha customers get away from DEC-branded servers; the company was established by the leader of the Digital migration center in Europe.

VMS might be just as essential in some companies as MPE has turned out to be. This is what's made Stromasys CHARON HPA a quiet success in your own community. As VMS customers face the end of HP's support for older hardware -- the latest OpenVMS won't run -- some of them may be looking to a virtualized version of the newer VMS systems. This strategy isn't without its efforts, too. Comparing migration to virtualization as a way into the future is likely to become a diligent task for another HP operating system customer base.

Comments

Boot Camper laying down migration steps

More than a decade after HP began its migration away from MPE and HP 3000, there's another underway among the vendor's enterprise systems. OpenVMS customers are starting to look into what's needed to make a transition off the Digital servers. HP's announced that it will curtail the use of the newest VMS to the very latest generation of hardware. Thousands of servers are going to be stuck on an older OpenVMS.

That will be one element to spark the offers at next month's VMS Boot Camp in Bedford, Mass. We heard from a veteran HP 3000 and MPE developer, Denys Beauchemin, that his company is headed to the Boot Camp for the first time this year. There's engagements and consulting to be made in moving HP enterprise users to less HP-specific environments.

"We migrate them from VMS to Linux or other platforms," said Beauchemin, who was the last working chairman at the Interex user group before the organization went dark in 2005. "Another HP operating system comes to an end."

Boot Camp is a VMS tradition among HP's most-loyal general purpose computing community. (You can't call the 3000 community HP's any longer, now that the vendor is coming up on seven years without a working lab.) Boot Camps in the past were annual meetings to advance the science and solutions around VMS. But in more recent times they haven't been annual. Now there's migration advice on hand for the attendees. Some may view it with disdain, but when a vendor sends up signals of the end of its interest, some kinds of companies make plans right away to migrate.

Comments

HP continues to abandon their faithful customers. They had sterling products and services acquired from DEC via Compaq (Alpha and VMS especially) to go with their own Itanium, MPE/iX, and HP-UX.

Rather than building in more value to further distinguish these stellar products and services from big-system
competitors IBM and Sun (before the latter got bought by Oracle), they chose tell their customers that anything branded HP was old and should be thrown away.

Having built operations on MPE/iX, we now feel the pain of VMS customers who are being similarly abandoned.

I admit that there might not be room in the computing world for all of MPE/iX, HP-UX, VMS, Tru64, and OSF/1, but I will never agree that all of them had to be killed off.

Now they complain about revenue loss? Customers are waving money at HP and they refuse it!